Fast broadband connections double in 2013

Akamai’s latest State of the Internet report shows 6.7 percent of New Zealand internet connections were above 10 Mbps in the third quarter of 2013.

Fast broadband accounts are rising fast.

Although that’s a rise of 133 percent on the previous year, our speeds are still behind the rest of the world. According to Akamai we rank 38, that’s one place behind Australia and a long way behind South Korea where 71 percent of connections are about 10 Mbps.

Keeping pace with worldwide broadband speeds

You could interpret those numbers as showing the investment and disruption of the government’s Ultrafast Broadband project means we are keeping pace with the rest of the world, not pulling up the table.

When it comes to broadband speeds of greater than 4 Mbps, New Zealand ranks at 41 in the world with 55 percent of connections operating at that level. In this table, we are three places ahead of Australia at 44.

Average connection speeds in New Zealand were 5.3Mbps, that’s behind the 5.8Mbps in Australia, but comfortably above the global average of 3.8Mbps. Average peak connection speeds were 21Mbps, well behind Australia which gets an average peak of 32.5Mbps.

Poor NZ mobile broadband

New Zealand’s average mobile connection speed at the end of 2013 was just 2.5 Mbps, less than half the 5.4 Mbps average in Australia. That puts our mobile broadband well behind most of Europe and North America. New Zealand’s peak mobile broadband speed of 11.9 Mbps was less than ten percent of the 135.6 Mbps peak in Australia.

Akamai reports for traffic from mobile devices on all networks, Apple’s Mobile Safari was responsible for just over 47 percent of requests, while Android Webkit drove only 32 percent of requests.